On the pulse

At the RCN Congress in Liverpool this week, some of the most pressing issues facing the nursing profession were on the agenda. In particular, two stories covered by Nursing Times highlighted the need for greater awareness of the value of some nursing roles.

NMC warns nursing directors to ensure safe staffing levels

Directors of nursing who fail to ensure their hospitals have adequate numbers of nurses could find themselves facing fitness to practise panels, the Nursing and Midwifery Council has warned.

Jackie Smith, NMC chief executive and registrar, highlighted the decision last week to issue a five year caution to Jan Harry, the former chief nurse of Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust.

Ms Harry was found guilty by a fitness to practise panel of putting patients in danger by failing to ensure there were enough nurses on wards at the scandal hit hospital between 1998 and 2006.

The panel concluded Ms Harry’s catalogue of failings amounted to misconduct and that her fitness to practise was impaired. They imposed a maximum five year caution “in order to mark your conduct as unacceptable and signal that this must not be repeated”.

Jackie Smith

Ms Smith told Nursing Times it was a “distinct possibility” that other nursing directors could face fitness to practise panels if they failed to ensure there were adequate numbers of nurses “to protect patients”.

She said: “There is a marker here. What the panel said was that it was her responsibility to ensure adequate nursing provision. The panel decided her practice fell well short of what was expected.”

Ms Smith said the NMC expected directors of nursing and those in leadership roles to already be doing what was needed, adding: “This is about protecting patient safety.”

Ms Harry had argued in her evidence to the panel that her role was purely strategic and not operational.

But the panel said nursing directors could not separate the two roles and the public had the right to expect a director of nursing to prioritise the provision of quality “frontline” nursing services.

It ruled against striking her off the register because no patients had been directly harmed by her personally and noted her “long, distinguished and otherwise unblemished” career.

Earlier this year an investigating committee for the NMC ruled Ms Harry’s successor Helen Moss had “no case to answer” and did not refer her to a fitness to practise panel. Ms Moss taking over as chief nurse in 2006.

In his report on the care failings at the trust, Robert Francis QC said there was no sense of urgency and an “unacceptable delay” in addressing the issues when Ms Moss arrived.

From next year the NMC will have new legal powers to re-consider the decisions made by the investigating committees.

Are you able to Speak Out Safely? Sign our petitionto put pressure on your trust to support an open and transparent NHS.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council is to be granted new powers by the government to allow it to re-open closed fitness to practise cases, Nursing Times has been told by the regulator’s chief executive and registrar.

Many trusts will need to increase their nurse numbers to comply with new national guidance on setting safe staffing levels in England, Nursing Times has been told. Meanwhile, latest workforce data shows huge variation between hospitals.

An increasing number of nurses are allowing their registrations to lapse each year, at a time when the NHS is struggling with a shortage of qualified staff, an investigation by Nursing Times has found.

A Midlands trust is reviewing its recruitment process and will launch an apprenticeship scheme next year in order to try and rectify concerns about staffing levels identified by hospital inspectors.

Readers' comments (24)

Anonymous12 November, 2013 3:32 pm

michael stone | 12-Nov-2013 2:38 pm

I've resigned from two jobs - quite recently - due to concerns about patient care and not being prepared to cut corners or put people at risk. Both were relatively lowly positions and both in the private sector (one a recently privatised service); if I can do it I don't see why the upper echelons should be exempt from having a conscience and taking responsibility for their actions or lack thereof.

If you take the salary, you take whatever responsibility goes with that job. If Chief Nurses or whoever know that patients are being at risk and they fail to do anything about it then they should consider their position or be prepared to take the consequences if things were to go wrong!

Good on you - you've clearly got a strong sense of right and wrong. I applaud you.

If you are old enough, you might remember that Lord Carrington resigned from Goverment apparently not because he thought he had directly made a mistake, but because 'mistakes were clearly made on my watch'. I don't think any other minister has done that more recently, though, so far as I can remember.

Isn't it a bit sad that Directors of Nursing should have to be reminded of their responsibilities to the patients in their hospitals? I mean really should all of this have to be spelt out to them? And how on earth did Jan harry at Stafford ever get the idea that staffing levels were nothing to do with her? I think she knew full well it came within her remit.

Anyway that can be no more excuses, it should now be crystal clear that the buck stops at the top. Don't take the job if you cant handle the responsibility. Oh and the same should go for Chief Execs too.

I found one of the previous comments particularly interesting. ' Directors of Nursing' will, in the future no longer be Nurses? If indeed this is the case, what about directors of Medicine?
If such changes are implemented across the senior positions then we could be entering the final stages of any form of responsibility, professional credibility and accountability within the NHS?
It is doubtful that Nursing or Medical directors could be held to account, especially if they hailed from a senior banking or local authority background? In this particular instance; no accountability, no professional code of conduct and consequently no inherent blame to failing 'directors' despite organisational failures that affect patients.
Personally, I would not work as a nurse or attend as a patient at any NHS trust that does not have a director of nursing that was not a registered Nurse or medical director that was not a GMC registered Doctor. The thin end of the wedge is being used in this instance (if indeed the case) for the executive ranks to be above any form of responsibility. Shamefully the 'wedge' is being used as a blunt tool to undermine all Nurses, Doctors and AHP's. Nevertheless, albeit initially, we seem alright about it?

I wasn't the previous poster but what I think s/he meant was that fewer nurses who go into management will retain any clinical time and so no longer have a PIN number so maybe once trained and worked as nurses but not be registered any more. I don't think the same thing will happen in medicine in hospitals but it is happening in CCGs where GPs do fewer and fewer sessions in their practice until they stop working as clinical practitioners altogether and become medical managers instead. Whilst it doesn't mean non clinical staff like local authority managers or people from banking ending up as nursing directors, again this has happened in CCGs and their predecessors for many years. I've known "commissioners" for things like continuing care and older people's services who've come from the motor industry, marketing, banking, retail, all sorts, and they talked the talk but OMG they knew so little about the service and patients. It's a shame that some nurses denigrate management roles so much because your experience. Insight and compassion are invaluable to these roles and they are better done by you. But we need more staff caring for patients first.

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